Science and Philosophy – A Fresh Perspective
Introduction
This set of lectures is a systematically-framed, fresh perspective on the the main components of major university courses. Although condensed, it is designed for easy expansion into a year’s tuition.
The work abbreviates, by comparison of materialistic and holistic interpretations, an explanation of the facts that make up our lives. It does so by ordering material into what is, basically, a simple, binary philosophical structure – Natural Dialectic.
‘Natural’ is often construed as a characteristic of any material item not devised by the mind or produced by the hand of man.
For its part, ‘Dialectic’ (or dialectical method) is to-fro discourse between opposing views in order to establish reasonable truth. Of course, there may exist several antagonists in a debate but, in the case of nature, it may be shown that only polarity or, at most, trinity, holds sway.
Their combination, ‘Natural Dialectic’, is one of different models mankind has used to try and understand the universe into which each one of us is, without asking, born. With roots deep in human thought and variously expressed at different times and places, the Dialectic’s ‘philosophical machine’ reflects the oscillatory framework within which nature operates.
Thrust
How accurate is this reflection? Does the cosmic system really oscillate within a dipole – energy and information? Butterfly and computer are certainly examples of highly informed, codified yet also energetic systems.
Code is devised and may be stored in mind but information’s physical expression employs material arrangements. The alphabets of well-known signalling networks include, as well as humanly devised systems of communication, bio-chemicals (supremely, DNA), binary nervous code and the sub-atomic elements, forces and atoms of physics and chemistry. Might natural code dictate, through the agents that a study of phenomena elucidates, the way things naturally turn out? Looked at this way cosmos is a Grand, Dynamic and Encoded Text. We’ll check if this could, almost unbelievably, be right.
Whether code or randomness defines our universal game, Natural Dialectic remains the structure within which the course of a parent book, Science and the Soul, is expressed. The Lectures extend many connections to the more elaborate explorations and explanations of that tome. They also link with ‘Adam and Evolution’, ‘A Mutant Ape? The Origins of Man’s Descent’, ‘A Potted Grammar of Natural Dialectic’ and ‘The New Look – A Summary of Summaries’.
Contents
Preface
Lecture 1: Introduction
Lecture 2: Information
Lecture 3: Psychology
Lecture 4: Physics
Lecture 5: Biology
Lecture 6: Community
Glossary
Connections
Index